For feminists interested in questions of freedom, the current era is as exciting as it is paradoxical. As we move into the second decade of the millennium, we find ourselves witnessing enhanced opportunities for women in many areas of life: More women than ever are earning college degrees and attending graduate and professional school, more women are now represented at the highest levels of government, and women continue to make major gains in the workplace (Rosin Reference Rosin2010a, Reference Rosin2010b).Footnote ¹ And while this progress is far from equal among the various populations of women, it is safe to say that within the United States, women today face fewer restrictions and have more options and opportunities to act in the world than ever before.Footnote ² Yet despite the increased presence of women and people of color within various elite circles, this is also a time of widening economic inequality.Footnote ³ This condition of enhanced opportunity for an increasingly diverse elite alongside widespread and deepening inequality has important implications for the ways that feminists understand the dynamics of freedom today.

Of course, assessing the state of women's freedom in terms of positions held or professional degrees earned reflects just one facet of feminist reasoning. Enhanced economic opportunities are but one way to think about freedom. If we accept Arendt's (Reference Arendt1958) alternative depiction of freedom as a practice of world building, in which subjects collectively initiate new and creative forms of action, then enhanced educational and occupational opportunities may tell us very little about women's political freedom. An affluent and college-educated woman may never have experienced a creative or inaugural moment of political action, while an unemployed single mother active in the Occupy Wall Street movement may feel herself continually engaged in acts of freedom. Put somewhat differently, if freedom is a practice, then data regarding women's economic and educational structures are going to tell only one part of the story.

If we think of freedom as what Zerilli (Reference Zerilli2005, ix) characterizes as “the right to be a participant in public affairs,” then today we are witness to a growing number of women engaged in two classic forms of political participation: voting and the holding of public office. As voters, women now often surpass men. According to a Pew Research Center report, female eligible voters participated in the 2008 election at a higher rate than did male eligible voters—65.7% versus 61.5%. Nearly 10 million more women voted than men (Lopez and Taylor Reference Lopez and Taylor2009, 5). And while women still lag in the number of representatives elected and appointed to public office, more of them than ever hail from underrepresented communities. More women, people of color, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender folks have come to occupy powerful positions in government. The enhanced presence of such subjects on the public stage is an extremely recent occurrence, yet its newness is blunted by a liberal logic that, despite its historic exclusions, continually reframes equality and inclusion as well-established facts. Rather than speaking of the discriminatory racial and sexual histories that led to the political disenfranchisement of women and people of color, today's public rhetoric is much more comfortable affirming our commitment to inclusion by emphasizing the present state of our increasingly diverse body of elected and appointed representatives. The celebratory (and self-congratulatory) rhetoric surrounding Barack Obama's election as the nation's first black president is the most vivid example of this phenomenon, but recent discussions of Hillary Clinton as U.S. Secretary of State and the recent Supreme Court appointments of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor also exemplify this dynamic.Footnote ⁴

Yet even here, feminists interested in the question of political freedom face new challenges, as the growing number of women elected officials has also led to increased ideological heterogeneity. Today's increasingly diverse body of public officials now includes well-known conservatives, such as former Alaska Governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ), and Governor Nikki Haley (R-SC). In a similar vein, my research on U.S. Latino politics shows a growing number of Latino conservatives being elected to public office. These Latino conservatives can no longer be defined exclusively in terms of Cuban Republicans. In the 2010 midterm elections, for the first time ever three Latino candidates—all Republicans and two of them Mexican Americans—won top statewide offices. In New Mexico, voters elected the nation's first Latina governor, Republican Susana Martinez. Republican Brian Sandoval became Nevada's first Hispanic governor. And in Florida, Republican Marco Rubio won the U.S. Senate race.Footnote ⁵ What are feminists to make of this? What does the growing presence of women and multicultural conservatives in U.S. public life mean for a feminist politics of freedom?

Refusing Utility: Negative Affect and Conservative Freedom

In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Zerilli (Reference Zerilli2005, 6) argues that too often, women's claim to freedom “could not be articulated or heard unless it was uttered as a claim to social justice.” The entanglement of women's freedom with what Zerilli calls “the social question” led feminists to make the case for women's rights “on the basis of social utility, be it in terms of difference or equality.” Either way, “the ballot was not an end in itself but a means to an end: the betterment of society” (p. 7). Calling for feminism to value women's political freedom as a good in itself, Zerilli (Reference Zerilli2005, 9) writes:

The increased presence of female conservatives and/or conservatives of color provides unexpected corroboration to Zerilli's insight regarding freedom's capacity to disturb and be “out of order.” Right-wing women unsettle the feminist claim that women's political freedom will lead to a more just solution to various social questions.Footnote ⁶ As Zerilli (Reference Zerilli2005, 6) notes, such claims assume “something unique in femininity” that allows women to make a special contribution to our politics. Yet rather than affirm such assumptions, female and multicultural conservatives have become increasingly adept at defining freedom as resistance to feminism and the logic of civil rights. Today, minority neoconservatives frequently characterize those concerned with questions of gender and racial justice as repressive, narrow, and excessively disciplinary. In other words, it is often the refusal of feminist critiques and progressive approaches to racial justice that are framed by conservatives as displays of agency, rebellion, and enacted freedom.Footnote ⁷

Not surprisingly, feminists and advocates for racial justice are often appalled by conservative efforts to depict social-justice movements not as spaces of freedom but as disciplinary sites of restriction. It is even more difficult for progressives to acknowledge the possibility that right-wing movements may involve acts of freedom in their own right. Yet by inaugurating novel political formations that draw on feminist and multicultural logics even as they seek to dismantle them, female and/or minority conservatives are engaged in practices of freedom with which feminists increasingly need to contend.

I want to suggest that work in the fields of feminist and queer theory around issues of affect represents a particularly generative site for thinking about freedom in our current moment of political paradox and contradiction.Footnote ⁸ I am especially interested in negative forms of affect, such as shame, anger, and other types of “bad feelings,” and how they relate to our understanding of freedom and individual agency. Increased attention to the contradictory dynamics of affect is useful – not only because it helps feminists make sense of the latent intensities that inform conservative politics, but also because it helps us understand how forms of ambivalence shape more progressive and radical forms of political thought and practice. For example, recent attempts to theorize shame have led to important insights about the nature of racial and sexual identities.

Literary scholar and queer theorist Love articulates a particularly compelling example of shame and how it operates as a complicated form of ambivalence. She writes:

In challenging “the pieties of gay identity,” Love expresses a progressive critique of what can sometimes feel like the disciplinary demands of certain iterations of gay pride. Radical subjects can take shameful pleasure in resisting such discipline. Calling for scholars to engage the power of negative affect, Love continues:

In keeping with Love's call to affect, I want to turn briefly to a Latino conservative who engages questions of freedom—the author and critic Rodriguez. He is most famous for his Reference Rodriguez1982 book Hunger of Memory, in which he spoke out aggressively against policies such as bilingual education and affirmative action. His more recent works, Days of Obligation (1992) and Brown (Reference Rodriguez2002), extends his status as a conservative Latino public intellectual, though this later work is more ideologically complicated. Moreover, despite Rodriquez's status as a gay Latino writer exploring questions of race and identity, his conservatism and right-leaning assertions make him a vexed figure in the fields of both queer theory and Latino studies.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, scholars of gender and sexuality will find Rodriguez a compelling interlocutor, although he is neither a woman nor a feminist, particularly because of his tendency to link freedom to his multiple, affectively engaged refusals to behave as a proper racial and sexual subject.

In turning to a writer more familiar to scholars of Latino studies than of feminism in order to develop an account of freedom and affect, I seek to resist the tendency to conflate identities with concepts.Footnote ¹⁰ Rather than assume that a feminist account of freedom must circulate exclusively around discussions of women, I invoke Yarbro-Bejarano's (Reference Yarbro-Bejarano1999, 338) powerful exhortation to draw on questions of sexuality to “rethink the whole field” of gender and Chicana/o studies, rather than taking a merely additive approach that helps sustain their marginalization. As Yarbro-Bejarano rightly notes, until we begin to rethink our tendency to associate particular areas of study exclusively with certain identity groups, we will remain trapped in a dynamic whereby “the men continue to do pretty much what they always did, the women do gender analysis and the lesbians and (to a lesser extent) the gay men critique homophobia and heterosexism.”

For Yarbro-Bejarano, sexuality is “not limited to who does what to whom in bed, but encompasses the analysis of desire of what moves us, period.” She continues:

Bejarano's effort to expand the purview of sexuality within Chicana/o studies beyond identities and toward forms of pleasure offers feminists a rich optic for considering how historically marginalized populations understand and articulate their visions of freedom.

In the case of Rodriguez, we encounter a writer whose understanding of identity reveals a discomfiting dynamic whereby loneliness, alienation, and shame are experienced as forms of melancholic pleasure and as sources (or markers) of freedom. Describing his travels in Mexico in Days of Obligation, he writes:

In his acerbic characterization of himself as a man who spent years “with his back turned to Mexico,” Rodriguez displays an ironic pleasure in calling attention to his aversion to the country. Moreover, in his refusal to transform racial shame into ethnic pride, he resists turning his trip to Mexico into a story of racial awakening and the discovery of his “true” homeland. Instead, for Rodriguez, freedom marks the possibility of change, of the new. To be free is to refuse the burden of cultural maintenance. Shifting his attention from Mexico to the state of public education in the United States, he writes:

For Rodriguez, the canon of Western history and political thought is the space of energetic acquisition and creative juxtaposition, whereas gay, women's, and ethnic studies are portrayed as anti-intellectual exercises in self-regard. Deeply inattentive to the intellectual contributions made by the fields of study he denigrates, he conflates freedom with a vision of assimilation that demands that racial subjects deny their own cultural past in order to engage in imaginative thinking and inspired forms of becoming. This aspirational aesthetic of freedom speaks volumes about the logic of right-wing multiculturalism—it compels precisely because it resists the politics of identity. At the same time, his audacious and disconcerting voice helps us discern the unexpected linkages between freedom and negative affect. For populations that have experienced social exclusion, Rodriguez's conservative assertions underscore how freedom can operate as a practice of desire that is simultaneously pleasurable yet shot through with shame.